The present invention relates to assessment of aortic coarctation from medical image data, and more particularly, to non-invasive hemodynamic assessment of aortic coarctation by computing blood pressure in the aorta based on patient-specific anatomy and blood flood estimated from medical image data.
Coarctation of the aorta (CoA) is a congenital defect characterized by a sever narrowing of the aorta, usually distal to the aortic arch. Congenital heart disease occurs in approximately eight out of every one thousand live births in the United States, and CoA patients account for approximately 5-8% perfect of those live births with congenital heart disease. Patients born with CoA depend on care through their lives and typically require risky and expensive operations, such as surgical repair or interventional procedures like stent implantation or balloon angioplasty.
For pre-operative evaluation of the severity of CoA in a patient, pressure gradients are typically used. These gradients can be estimated from pressures measured in the arms, leg, or other extremities, but the current clinical gold-standard is obtained by invasive cardiac catheterization to measure the pressure drop across the coarctation site. However, a non-invasive technique for accurately measuring the pressure drop across the coarctation site to determine the severity of COA is desirable.